Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time

283 Pages·2014·1.47 MB·English

by  Mark Abel

Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time
Historical Materialism
Book Series
Editorial Board
Sébastien Budgen (Paris)
Steve Edwards (London)
Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam)
Peter Thomas (London)
VOLUME 73
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm

Graffiti on a wall in Turin. Photo by the author.
Groove: An Aesthetic
of Measured Time
By
Mark Abel
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Abel, Mark, 1948– author.
 Groove: an aesthetic of measured time / Mark Abel.
  pages cm. — (Historical materialism book series, ISSN 1570–1522 ; 73)
 Includes bibliographical references and index.
 ISBN 978-90-04-24293-7 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-24294-4 (e-book) 1. Musical meter and
rhythm. 2. Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. I. Title. II. Title: Aesthetic of measured time.
 ML3850.A16 2014
 781.2’2—dc23
2014010030
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Contents
Introduction: The Meaning of Musical Time  1
Music and Time  2
The Meaning of Form  4
Music as Symbolism  7
The Structure of the Book  12
1 What is ‘groove’?  18
Four Elements of Groove  24
1 Metronomic Time  24
2 Syncopation  31
3 ‘Deep metricality’ or Multi-levelled Meter  42
4 Back-beat  49
2 Is Groove African?  61
The Making of Popular Music  72
Rhythm in African Music  77
Historicising Musical Meter  84
3 Bergsonism and Unmeasurable Time  92
Bergson’s Metaphysics of Time  94
Deleuze and the Multiplicity of Time  97
Zuckerkandl’s Audible Time  104
4 Schutz’s ‘Vivid Present’ and the Social Time of Music  116
Schutz’s Phenomenology  119
Music as Phenomenon  125
Growing Older Together  130
Making Music  133
Overcoming the Dichotomy of Inner and Outer  143
5 Adorno and Reified Time  147
The Time of Jazz  149
Time in Music  153
‘Serious’ Music and Time  157
Modernism and the Trend towards Stasis  162
Music and the Empirical World  166
Subjectivity and Collectivity  176
vi contents
Presentness  180
Adorno’s Contribution  184
6 Meter, Groove and the Times of Capitalism  187
Abstract Labour and Abstract Time  195
Exchange and Abstract Time  206
Monopoly Capitalism and the Discipline of Abstract Time  213
World Time  218
7 History, Modernism, and the Time of Music  222
Time and Narrative  223
The Structure of History  229
The Historical Consciousness of Modernity  236
Groove as a Musical Modernism  243
Temporal Quality, Quantity and Measure  245
The Politics of an Aesthetic of Measured Time  251
References  257
Index  270
Introduction
The Meaning of Musical Time
Groove music is the music of our age. Scan the radio channels and, unless you
hit upon one of the few classical music stations, it is groove music that you will
hear. The sounds emanating from the earphones of the millions of iPods and
other audio devices that are so much a part of contemporary life are even more
overwhelmingly dominated by groove music. And although some of the music
that accompanies film and video draws on classical sources or pastiches of
classical styles, groove music is nonetheless also the most likely kind of music
to emerge from our television and computer speakers.
Musical groove began as a Western phenomenon, but, like many other
aspects of Western culture in the era of globalisation, has now spread to other
parts of the world. Not only is music featuring Western artists commonly avail-
able for sale and broadcast across the non-Western and developing world, but
many indigenous non-Western musics have been deeply influenced and trans-
formed by the groove concept. Groove music is becoming as ubiquitous across
the world as it already is in the West; so dominant, in fact, that its presence
goes largely unnoticed, its characteristics unconsciously accepted as simply
the way music is.
So what is groove music? We shall thoroughly examine the features of
groove, what makes it work and how it differs from other kinds of music, in a
subsequent chapter. For now, let us provisionally and loosely describe it as syn-
copated music with a prominent, regular beat. Groove, then, is a way of organ-
ising the temporal aspect of music: it is a particular approach to musical
rhythm and meter.
Groove emerges in Western popular music around the turn of the twentieth
century and represents a distinct departure in the organisation of musical
time. It constitutes something like a paradigm shift in musical temporality
and, for better or worse, has had in just over a century a far-reaching impact on
our musical culture and what we understand music to be. Why did such a
transformation take place and how should it be understood?
In setting out to answer these questions, this book adopts a historical mate-
rialist perspective on art. That is, it is committed to the view that cultural phe-
nomena, although governed by their own rules and procedures, do not belong
to an autonomous realm, but are ultimately to be explained in relation to the
material foundations of the societies that produce them. Significant new
developments in artistic practice are not simply invented, or delivered by
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004�4�944_���
2 Introduction
inspiration, but are driven, albeit in complex and often highly mediated ways,
by developments in the way society is organised at a fundamental level. Simply
stating this principle, however, does not automatically provide answers to two
crucial questions for a study of musical temporality. What kind of relationship
exists between musical time and the time outside music, social time? And
what kind of methodology is appropriate for a historical materialist analysis of
music? That is, where in the music should we look for traces of materiality, of
concrete social existence? We will need to address these preliminary questions
before moving on to the question of groove itself.
Music and Time
When we consider musical time, we find that, among the various musics pro-
duced during the course of human history across the world, there have been a
wide variety of ways of organising musical temporality. The Western system of
the last few hundred years involving the metrical organisation of beats and
note durations is only one of these, and is far from universal. If we are commit-
ted to the position that these procedures, just as with any artistic practice,
form or style, are not purely internal to the artform itself, but are connected to,
as reflections or expressions of, other, non-artistic, human practices and expe-
riences, how are we to explain these differences in musical temporality?
We might argue that all music, at least to some extent, represents an attempt
to capture the reality of time, paralleling in the aesthetic sphere attempts to
grasp the reality of time by scientists such as Newton and Einstein or philoso-
phers like Aristotle or Bergson. This raises the possibility that some musics suc-
ceed better than others in this goal, and that it may ultimately be possible to
create a music that adequately captures the reality of time. After all, it has been
argued that while space is best grasped visually, temporality is auditory, it
comes to us in sounds and rhythms.1 But the fact that there are so many diver-
gent ways of organising musical time suggests that music does not seek to pin
down the reality of time in any objective sense.
More persuasive, perhaps, is the idea that just as the variety of styles and
methods in the history of the visual arts represent ‘ways of seeing’, in John
Berger’s resonant phrase, musical styles are ‘ways of hearing’.2 From this per-
spective, figurative paintings should not be understood as attempts to capture
definitively the objective reality of their objects, even if that is the intention of
1 Scaff 2005, p. 8.
2 Berger 1972.